Last week's training

So,, for the second week in a row, the club had a real treat last weekend - a visitor! And not just any visitor - a bouvier visitor! Thomas Vogt came down from New Jersey with his trainer Steve and the dogs. Tom brought Cosmo, a nice male from Linda Prisco's lines. It's always fun seeing new folks in the bouvier world who are interested in working their dogs!

Overall, training went really well. Carla brought out a bunch of dogs to show Tom, from Gypsy to Yankee and Doodle, to Tchaikovsky. Ray Snipes, Tchai's personal decoy, is leaving soon, and Tchai's getting older, so that bitework session probably marked his official retirement. Which is sad, because Tchai is one of the greats of my own generation. I always tell Carla and Fred that my favorite litter from their lines was the Q (Quicksilver/Que/Macho) litter, and the T litter (Tchai/Tommy) was a pretty close second-favorite. Tchai's real exercise was always the attack on handler, out of the blind, the one that was taken out of the SchH program years ago. Ray, who is a great decoy, is pretty much thrown when Tchai hits. On the courage test, Tchai starts out strong but then builds in speed, as a freight train. He has as much heart as any dog I've ever seen. So for me, he was the highlight of the weekend.

The rest of the dogs were also good. I'm starting to figure out the new camera (actually, Steve is figuring it out for me!) and am enjoying documenting our bouviers' progress.

Uzzi and Xen also did well this weekend. They did good work, which is harder as the weather gets warmer. (For me as well as them!) Fortunately, it's looking like a comfortable weekend coming up.

I'm also very excited about the new training that we'll be working on with my Xen. This weekend, we did some tough tracking with Xen at the local elementary school. And Carla has agreed to travel with me to other fields for training. We are looking at a possible trip to DC for their practice trial in August, which will be amazing!